“I there are two ends of the spectrum that work. There’s the speedway style of racing [at the Daytona International Speedway and Talladega Superspeedway] that’s flat-out and easy to drive and they’re all bunched up,” Patrick said. “It’s not really fair to have all the racing like that. It’s entertaining when we go there.

“I think you need to have tracks where you’re dedicated more to making your car go fast. When you slide around and move around a lot, tracks like Atlanta and Homestead, you slip and slide around, it makes for passing, too. We need to figure out how to get cars have a transition at the end of the run. That’s when you’re going to create passing. Making them easier to drive is going to make them more like a speedway.”

“Our main goal is to harvest data today to help refine the 2015 package,” said Gene Stefanyshyn, NASCAR vice president of innovation and racing development. “We are listening to our fans. They have said they like a lot of passing, side-by-side racing and lead changes. That is what we are aiming to accomplish with these tests.”

One idea that seems to have traction was the driver-adjustable track bars. Those are big springs in the back of the car that adjust the height of the car. That would make it easier for drivers to dial-up traction as conditions change and the weight of the car changes as it burns gas.

“That can improve the safety, but at the same time, competition-wise, being able to adjust the track bar can clearly make it more competitive,” Greg Biffle said. “I mean, you can adjust over the tire run, over the fuel run. What we’ve got to be careful of is people fudging the rules and getting it to do other things, so that’s one thing that we need to protect from, but I like it.

“To spice it up a little bit, these are things that don’t cost the teams a tremendous amount of money. It’s going to cost some. It puts a little ingenuity into it. If it’s easy to police, I like it.”

The next race is Saturday night at the Bristol Motor Speedway. It’s a half-mile bull ring that relies as much on a driver saving his equipment and tires as the car itself.

In short, it's everything drivers like.

A week later, the series moves to the Atlanta Motor Speedway, where lap times fall off drastically as the tires wear.